by Anne B. Shlay and Gordon Whitman

Abstract: The premise of urban political economy is that urban patterns are not inevitable but can be altered with change in institutional and power arrangements. Yet actually shifting power from one group to another is easier said than done. Urban political economy is better at theorizing and documenting the structure of political dominance than showing how it can be modified. How may community organizations acquire leverage that permits them to alter political decision making around space and urban development? This paper describes a collaboration between a city-wide faith based coalition and a university public policy research center designed to begin to alter the politics around policy decisions on blight in Philadelphia. Called “Research for Democracy,” this collaboration represents the coupling of research and organizing sophistication that permitted the structuring of research as part of community organizing and vice versa. Research showing the distribution, causes and influences of abandonment was used to show the pervasiveness of blight and its pernicious effects on all Philadelphia neighborhoods, not solely neighborhoods with concentrated abandonment. As a consequence, Philadelphia’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative was broadened to include money for neighborhood stabilization, acquisition and improvements, not solely demolition as originally defined. This paper shows how a regularized process of research tied symbiotically to organizing can be a successful tool for shifting power relationships.

Link to full article: http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers2004/shlay/shlay.htm